


CHCl3

by Icosagens



Series: Voyager 1 [3]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman and Robin (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Canon-Typical Violence, Car Trips, Coping, Denial of Feelings, Dick Grayson is Batman, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Jason tries his best, Kissing in the Rain, Memories, Multi, Nightwing Volume 2 Issue 093, Past Character Death, Stephanie Brown is Batgirl, There is fighting, They talk, Trauma, but no homo, but they talk, i'll sit in the shower embracing you while fully clothed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27038023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icosagens/pseuds/Icosagens
Summary: Damian's attempt to apprehend a criminal gets close to going goes pear-shaped, and Jason tries to weather dire straits as Roland Desmond's last night on Earth takes on new life in Dick's mind in the aftermath. There is fighting. There is tense silence. There is more fighting—in a car, this time.But hey, at least he's in good company.
Relationships: Dick Grayson/Jason Todd, Dick Grayson/Jason Todd/Donna Troy
Series: Voyager 1 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1889794
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27





	CHCl3

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lostandlonelybirds (RUNNFROMTHEAK)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RUNNFROMTHEAK/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dick leans forward and kisses him, and then Jason is the one who is flinching.
> 
> His lips are cold, that’s the first thing Jason registers. Cold, and wet, and God, he still hasn’t gotten on shaving that stubble. He should feel something. He knows he should, but he thinks maybe someone took a spoon and scooped out the normal parts of him, the human parts of him, a long time ago. 
> 
> Jason is Bruce’s monster, the Joker’s monster, Lazarus’ monster, Talia’s monster. That must be why as Dick kisses him, all he can think is, “when is this going to be over.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for miss ak-47:  
> happy birthday, akngel! i did not know what to do for you at first, but eventually figured i could not go wrong with jaydickdonna + damian + addressing a piece of dick's trauma. in hindsight i probably should have asked you if you liked steph before i wrote her in—*shrugs*—whoops. i love youuu.
> 
> for readers:  
> • this is jason's pov so assume that, "to assume is to make an ass of you and me," is applicable at all times.  
> • if i were to timeline this, i would say it takes place approx. two years after batman and robin vol. one #26.

When one of the golden trio comes aknockin' at the doors of Jason's safehouses, he typically gives them five seconds to explain what misfortune has caused them to incur upon him their presence before kicking them to the curb. Depending on what they have to say for themselves, he does or does not agree to step _out_ the door. He has learned the hard way never to let one of them _in_ ; they work like cockroaches.

Today is one of those days. Dick's footsteps are unmistakeable, even from the hallway. They curl around the floor like morning dew on the rim of a flower, and vanish with the sun. Jason thinks that were it not for his Lazarus-enhanced hearing, they would seem graceful.

 _Bang! bang! bang!_ I don't think they can hear you in Manila, Dick, why don't you knock a little louder.

With a face that midlines somewhere between a lour and exasperation, Jason heads toward the door, and unlatches the deadbolt. He cracks it open, then slips his boot between the resulting gap to finish the job.

Steph's face is the first one he sees, and his first clue-in to the fact that this isn't a run-of-the-mill social call disguised as pursuing help on a case. Her expression is low-cast, her eyes are hooded, and she has the general air of a child who just got her parade rained on. He's almost tempted to raise an eyebrow, but he can read a mood as well as the next guy. Instead, he looks to Steph's right, where Dick is standing, with a hand to her shoulder. His fingers are tight, trembling, almost, Jason notes.

Dick and Steph have been getting closer via the mystifying household they have begun to form around Damian, but they are not "privy to the more intimate sides of Dick's touch-based love language" close. This time, Jason doesn’t stop his eyebrow from raising.

Speaking of Damian, who completes the picture: the kid looks _trashed._ Knowing as much as he does about the League and their whole, "The body is a gift of the Earth, treat it as you would a temple," shtick, Jason is well-aware Damian would gargle liquidized Carolina reaper before he got wrecked. That’s why he finds himself set so off-kilter by his bloodshot eyes and runny nose. Damian shouldn't be sweat drenched and twitching in Dick's cape, and he _definitely_ shouldn't be clomping around with his tunic sprayed in vomit.

"Do I need to call Child Services?" Jason asks, and it's less of a joke than he originally intends.

"Tt. If you're of the inclination to get arrested," Damian rejoins. It's the most lackluster retort that's Jason's heard come out of his mouth in—probably ever.

It's a fifty-fifty shot whether sallying back with something equally acerbic or going for levity will strike true, so Jason, ever prudent, decides to wave them all in without acknowledging his snipe at all.

Whether this will be a mistake or not remains to be seen.

"Get in, or do you _want_ the neighbors to see the goddamned Batman standing outside of my apartment?"

When Damian sweeps past him without another word, Jason expects Dick to be hot on his heels. Instead, he says, "The bathroom's to the right, Dames. Don't take more than ten minutes in the shower, OK?"

Jason isn't so disturbed that Dick knows the layout of a safehouse he should know nothing about, but that's mostly because he's saving that emotion for parsing through the fact that Damian acquiesces with a nod, all silence and circumstance.

"I'm serious, Damian," Dick calls after his back.

Damian responds with several choice phrases in Arabic, Urdu, and Hindi, and because he’s like that, French and Dick’s dialect of Romani. Two years with Bruce and another with Talia had done wonders for Jason’s lingual knowledge; he represses what likely would have been a snort. _The bottom of a dirty shoe indeed, Dickie._

Jason thinks he deserves a medal for waiting all the way until he hears the pipes begin to churn before he expresses any sort of agreement with this sentiment.

"I'd say 'Care to explain?'” he says, “but that implies that you have any sort of choice right now."

Dick gives Steph's shoulder a squeeze, and then lets his arm fall to his side. Affording him a nod, Steph makes her way over to the kitchen table, and wraps a pinkie around one of Jason's kitchen chairs. She slides it out from under the table, then plops down and stares right up at him, deer-in-the-headlights-strikes-back-esque thing. Rather than follow suit, Dick remains hovering by the wall, distinctly with his line of sight on both the room's other occupants and all of the exits. He's good enough that Jason can't tell whether this was a deliberate choice, or just a careworn habit that was the fruits of having B as a primary caretaker for six years.

Jason stares Steph and him dead on, before taking a seat next to her, angling his chair so that he has a similar view of the room as Mr. I Am Darkness, I Am The Night.

In a room full of people just as notorious for quipping their enemies into submission as they are fighting them, no one says a word. He finds himself forcing a relaxed stance, doing his best not to absorb the atmosphere.

Lesson one à la Bruce Wayne in having command of an environment is, "The moment you let yourself succumb to the emotions of others, you give them leverage. Remain aware of what is going on in your own mind, and dissociate it from what is going on in others'. Compassion has its time and place; a standoff with an enemy or a boardroom meeting isn't one of them."

“I’m going to put in my headphones and turn on my professor’s lecture now,” says Steph. “I’m going to blast my volume all the way up. Here’s to hoping it annoys the crap out of you.”

She does as she says, and it does, in fact, annoy the crap out of Jason. However, he finds himself reappraising her, as he turns to Dick.

"Do I have to go shut off the apartment complex's water so I can get an answer out of number five over there in the shower, instead?"

 _You're so funny I forgot to laugh,_ he hears in Dick's voice, in what is probably a forlorn attempt on the part of his mind to fill the spaces between what was before whatever incident had left Damian wrapped in the Batman cape, and what is now.

 _This_ Dick runs a hand through his hair, ferrying his weight back on the wall, and says, "Look, I—don't really know where to start here. Damian's hurt, and we need a place to crash while I do some damage control with the Commish."

Steph snorts, an uncharacteristically sardonic thing, and crosses her legs over each other. Rather than standing tall, she is hunched slightly inward. It's not a good look on her. "'Damage control,' is about the understatement of the year."

"OK, one, aren’t you supposed to be listening to your lecture?” asks Jason. “And two? This 'vague' thing? Isn't working for me. We're not in the Batcave anymore, Toto. That kid looks like he's fresh out of a Lambda Phi Epsil-whatever hazing, and I'd like to know why."

“It’s not my story to share,” says Dick, and it’s not three seconds after this that Jason grabs him by the suit and yanks it so that their noses brush against each other. The room levels off in the exact approximate temperature range that the cold tip of Jason’s nose makes this touch physically painful.

There are only so many things _that_ could mean, and Dick knows it. Dick knows that _Jason_ knows it.

“I told you all,” he says, “that something like this was going to happen. It goes on and on. B never stopped, and now _you’re_ following in his footsteps. He let Two-Face beat you into a pile of pulp; he let the Joker shoot you close enough to the heart that it was a _damn_ close call. He let the clown _kill_ me!” 

He looks toward Steph, heartbeat ablaze, the Batman emblem still smushed in his closed fist. For this part, he takes two deep, long breaths.

“What he let Mask do to you is inexcusable. And what you just let happen—”

Shifting back toward Dick, he braces himself to shove him back outward, keeping a hold on his shirt just long enough to be sure that he isn’t going to lose his balance and bang into the wall before letting go.

“—is despicable.”

It’s a little belatedly that he realizes that, one, Dick’s got the balance of an acrobat, and two, even if he didn’t, he would have deserved whatever awful, shining thing of a bruise bloomed up as a result. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Whatever.

Dick, for his part, is breathing in intermittent huffs, the way that a typical person does after being caught in the position Jason had just put him in. His face isn’t visible through the cowl, but—

as solipsistic as it sounds, Dick isn’t _typical_ in any sense of the word. The quality of being extraordinary is more ordinary than it’s colloquial to admit, but this man? He is a fool.

“You think I don’t know that?” Dick snaps. It’s abrupt, and it hits the air with such dissonance that Jason finds it contrived in the same way it would be in a particularly bad story. _“Do you seriously think I don’t know that?”_

Jason opens his mouth, but Dick blows right over him.

“You’re right,” he says, and Jason _stops._

“Bringing kids into a job that messes up most adults is wrong, _you’re right._ Is that what you wanted to hear, Jason?”

Steph gives them both one long, low look, before pointedly raising her phone up in the air and jamming her thumb on the upper volume button. Jason takes this as his invitation to strike.

“Do you ever hear yourself?” he snaps. “ _No,_ that’s not what I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to have to hear anything in the first place. You just got a fourteen-year-old kid _raped,_ do you think any decent human being in the world would get their daily dose of schadenfreude off of that?”

Something occurs to him, in that moment, and the periphery of his vision becomes encroached by green flares. They expand, and grow, and then—

“I should never have thought you were any different from _him,”_ Jason spits. “Maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe Bruce wasn’t the start and end of the _malfunction_ in this city. Because clearly, he’s passed something down to _you!”_

This is the part where Dick blows up. This is the part where Dick always blows up, and Jason braces himself for it, lets the muscles that coil up his bones hug them so tightly that they ache. Thrum. Waits to give him a shiner to remember, because if he thinks he has any modicum of a right to feel— _anything_ —at this point. If he thinks—

“Would you like the cowl, Jason?” Dick asks, and Jason parses through each and every word, several times and then several times again. They are just as open as his untensed, inexpressive face.

_“What?”_

Despite himself, Jason’s tongue moves, and it forms a word, and that word is “what.”

“You wanted it when B went on his time travel sabbatical, didn’t you? Do you still want it?”

Sometimes he feels like, when they’re talking, it’s not even him Dick’s addressing. That it’s someone else, and Jason’s a prettied up effigy.

It’s exactly like that this time, except this time, his voice carries through and mists across Jason.

Dick’s breathing is heavy.

“Are you _high?”_ Jason asks. It shouldn’t even be a real question, the night was too fresh on their faces when they threw themselves all gloom and doom on his doorstep. But—

he finds himself grasping at straws in trying to think of another explanation for the way that Dick holds himself, the way he sinks beguiledly into the armor of the Batsuit.

“I’m not high, Jason, just...”

“Just…?”

“Tired,” Dick says, and when he sighs, it weighs enough for every soul he’s failed to save. “I’m tired, Jason. What happened to Damian tonight is inexcusable. You’re right; it’s my fault. I gave Damian Robin because I thought it was what I needed to do to keep him in Gotham—what would help him decide to stay somewhere that was safer for him, and where he could grow up like every kid should be able to.”

“It was wrong. I was the adult. I could have found another way.”

 _Sorry,_ Bruce might have said, and when he would he would have sighed, it would weigh enough for every soul he had failed to save. _I’m sorry, Jason. You’re right; it’s my fault. I gave you Robin because I thought it was what I needed to do to keep you off of the streets—what would help you decide to stay somewhere that was safer for you, and where you could grow up like every kid should be able to._

_It was wrong. I was the adult. I could have found another way._

Yeah, as if.

“Tell that to your kid,” says Jason. It’s rough-hewn, it’s low, the tongue-scrape-my-trachea-may-God-forgive-me low. He sounds ill. His words are brawny. He sounds like he’s about to keel over from the plague. His words could have come from the mouth of Moses as he asserverated his Lord’s commandments.

They better be, because this _son of a bitch_ deserves nothing less.

“Speak of the devil and he shall appear,” droles a voice from behind Jason. It’s—understated, if he has to use one word, and it’s got a whittled down, raspy quality to it.

“Devil? You? I never would have guessed,” says Steph, popping one of her headphones out of her ear. If the megawatt grin on her face had any more verve to it, the damage it would do to Jason’s eyes would be absolutely _bloodthirsty._ She’s tapping out a rhythm with her finger under the swell of her cape. Thinks she’s being subtle about it too, probably.

Little Damian’s eyes, when Jason turns around to glance at him, are narrowed right there on that finger.

“Let’s get one thing straight:”

Standing there in a pair of Jason’s rolled up sweats, which are folded at the waist over a binder clip, and an undershirt, he levies all three of them with a glare. It leaves behind the distinct impression that he, despite being shorter than all three of them, is the one looking down. London Bridge is falling _down,_ before the feet of a tiny giant.

“if you do not stop overreacting, I will pick up and _leave._ Perhaps I will seek out Colin. Perhaps I will pursue my father on his quest to colonize the world’s vigilantes under the name of the bat. Perhaps, even, I will become a hitchhiker and find myself secreting through the streets of Star City. In any case, you shan’t be able to find me, and you shall regret your brutal misconduct to the grave.”

Jason’s too busy trying to unwrap this kid’s mind to catch a Dick-visage-special, but the inflection in Dick’s voice illuminates enough for this not to matter. Admittedly, he does a nice job of it: throat whipped raw enough for a natural timbre, intonation with all of the irregularities of a heartbeat.

“I thought that you were never talking to Bruce again, Damian? I never took you as the type to go chicken on cold turkey.”

It’s too bad for Dick, really, that he’s around the wrong people to play his pretty little fiddle. But there’s something else. A coiffed, airtight quality to his words that starts to leave pinpricks in Jason’s gut.

“I’m not,” Damian says, crisply, “which is why I’ll be taking my leave now, because, as promised, I’ll be going cold turkey on all of you. _Nothing happened._ Or at least, nothing of note. You look like you’re about to have an aneurysm, Grayson.”

Probably, it’s a testament to how far Damian’s come that Jason feels a tang of surprise in his throat at the fact that he had completely and snidely dismissed whatever was going on in Dick’s head. It only serves to get that great-green feeling all _sizzling_ up inside of him again.

He hasn’t heard defense mechanisms like that out of Damian’s mouth in years. Hasn’t watched him use emotions to swallow others whole in almost as long.

Jason clutches onto his leg so hard that he wants to scream.

“Bullshit.”

It takes Jason a moment to realize that those words had not come out of his mouth, but Steph’s.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” she says. “You don’t owe any of us anything. But this—what you’re doing now?—is just going to hurt you in the long run.”

“Shut up, Stephanie,” Damian says, hushedly. He clutches whatever secret exists behind those words close. “Nothing actually happened.”

Stephanie does not shut up.

“Maybe it didn’t. But it almost did. You don’t have to minimize that.”

Ah.

So it didn’t _—ah._

Jason hates the sick relief that washes through his veins. It leaves him feeling like he’s been bleached from the inside out. Bye, bye, epithelium, hello sweet pain.

Almost. _Almost._

Dick’s being awfully quiet, Jason realizes. So is he, for that matter.

Stalwartly refusing to look at him, Jason instead says, “Listen to blondie, kid.”

It feels more of an obligatory statement than any actual nudge toward wisdom. By the tilt of Damian’s eyebrow, he must note this. Grain of salt it is, then.

“There are...” Damian starts, as his eyebrow falls. His face is startlingly clean of lines and intonation. Soft. Wide. Childlike. Even before his teenaged years, Jason had rarely ever seen such a look on his face. “There are people whom this actually happens to. This was _nothing._

“For one,” he continues, “I was not even stripped of my clothes, but for two…” He breathes, and Jason finds himself impressed that he doesn’t wince when he sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, “... it was a woman. That hardly counts.”

Jason hears a sharp intake of breath somewhere to his right. He ignores it.

“Do you hear yourself?” he asks. “Do you even know how many people’s experiences you’ve just said ‘don’t count.’”

“I—” Damian starts, but Jason steamrolls right over him.

“The fact that she’s a woman means _nothing,”_ he asserts. “You know what she is? She’s poison. Just like every other rapist.”

Footsteps. The opening and closing of a door. Jason barely hears it as his thoughts crescendo into a flurry of dissonant pieces.

“Whoah,” says Steph, “you have a point, but cool your jets, zombie boy. Damian doesn’t need the Spanish Inquisition right now.”

“What he needs is—”

“I’m right here, you know,” Damian interrupts. He’s sat down, Jason notes, and he’s pushing around the mud they had tracked all over the tile to doodle on the ground with his foot. His eyes are hooded, and he does not look at any of them.

“Stop acting like a little kid and we’ll stop treating you like one,” Jason tells him. “Maybe consider actually listening to what we have to say.”

It has been—a while, since there has been this much vitriol between the two of them. Were Jason not clamping down tightly onto the inner workings of his heart, there would have been even more.

“Consider listening to _me,_ you mean,” says Steph. _“You’re_ going to go after Dick.”

“Like hell I am,” Jason snaps, as earlier noises begin to click together to form the conclusion that Dick had, in fact, left the room.

Coward.

“Yeah, like hell you are, devilman _._ Even if he _didn’t_ look like he was about to take a flying leap off of Wayne Enterprises HQ, you’re gunning for heads right now and that’s the last thing anyone in this room needs.”

 _Actually,_ Jason wants to start, but he hears it in the voice of the fifteen-year-old who disobeyed every other one of Batman’s orders. _You’re not my mom,_ makes him want to lose his lunch, and, _Fuck off,_ isn’t going to impress anyone, so Jason settles for gritting his teeth as hard as he can. His jaw creaks, but irascibility isn’t a reputation he wants to go down for tonight. He holds his silence.

Honestly, Jason’s waiting for Damian to volunteer but he—doesn’t. He stands there, in his t-shirt and pants six sizes too large, stands there with his fists clenched at his sides and his gaze on the mud he’s painting across the floor, and doesn’t say a word.

“Fine,” Jason says, in the coolest, crispest voice he can manage. “I’ll go after him.”

“Great,” says Steph, and it’s back to that megawatt smile and kindergarten teacher cheer.

Jason scoffs, but doesn’t bother to say anything.

“Which way did he go?” he asks, groping for the zipper on his jacket with one hand and nicking the keys from the counter with the other.

No one responds.

“Baby Talia?” Jason probes, levelling him with the most intimidating, “don’t think you’re getting out of this on my pity” stare he can manage.

"I don't know where he is," Damian intones, scratching what’s probably a veritable Monet into the mud-encrusted tile with his toe. With his chin propped in his hand and his eyes flickering between drowse and dusk, it is a sad vestige of preconceived vehemence.

Seriously? Jason wants to demand. But then Damian swallows; Jason spots a— _jesus_ —curling around his Adam's apple.

Yeah. _Yeah._

What he needs to do is go to _Dick_ and say, You don’t deserve to let this get to you. ~~What’s going on with you?~~ You can’t look after a kid for five minutes after you almost get him raped? ~~You should have let Steph look after him from the beginning, if this was getting to you so badly.~~ He deserves better than you. ~~He needs you.~~

~~Don’t we all?~~

It's this thought that spurs Jason into slipping his phone off of the charger, too, on his way out. Giving into Steph as he had, the one thing he wouldn’t acquiesce to was his desire to slam the door. It’s not hard to imagine the pleasure that would strike in the recesses of her mind that she’s too good to show the world at that.

Scanning the hallways for any sign of Dick’s “road not taken” is more habit than anything else. No one who’s lived with Bruce for longer than a month would ever leave even the quietest wisps of themselves behind. It’s why he has to blink several times when he catches the brick propping the door to the roof open. That’s not just a happy accident, either. The bricks in the wall are loose, but they still aren’t easy to pry out.

Jason sighs, leans against the wall, and flips the phone into a position that he can turn it on and unlock it from. _Maps. Apps. Contacts._

There it is.

It doesn’t take much scrolling to get down to the bottom; Jason has a dozen or so people programmed to it in all. _Dickface, Little Red Riding Hood._ B’s in there, somewhere, too. Jason has him programmed in as _See You Next Tuesday._

 _Wonder Chick_ is at the very bottom. She’s given him her number twice, actually. The first time was when he was still spiffing and new to prancing around in the pixie boots and loafers so shiny they squeaked, and had gone on that one mission with the Titans. God, back then he had used to clamp down on all the alarm bells that sounded off at things like that and tell Bruce about his day.

He doesn’t like to talk about the other time; he does not like to think about what made her decide to slip a piece of paper behind his ear and tuck it under his hair. The fact that if his thoughts drift the right way the ghost of Dick’s lips catch the edge of his teeth. That he still knows what his poorly shaved jaw feels like when it brushes against the bone by his ear.

That has to have been the only shovel talk that ended with the shoveler’s number in the buried’s hand. Possibly, the only ever shovel talk given as repercussion to something that could never be more than a one night stand. Definitely the only shovel talk given by a participant in said one night stand.

That’s Donna Troy, for you.

Jason doesn’t even allow himself the reprieve of clenching his jaw before clicking “call.”

The ringtone buzzes once. Then twice. Then—

“I did not think you would ever take me up on using this number, Jason.”

Donna’s voice has the same soft warmth as the sun’s aubade to beach sands. Jason chokes down what might be the beginning of a—snort? desperate giggle? _God no—_ and ends up letting out a noise between sardonic and a hard place.

“I didn’t either,” he says. “Believe me, this isn’t a social call.”

“What is it, then?” asks Donna. Her tone makes a seamless metamorphosis to complement his own. It’s disorienting, almost.

“I fucked up.”

It is not an admission, no. He refuses to kneel before anyone’s confession pew.

“Would you like to explain?” Donna invites, and her words don’t move an inch in inflection. Their mellowness laps at his heels, incessantly. It doesn’t burn. It’s not unpleasant.

That’s the worst part.

“Dick fucked up first,” he says, and he feels an uncomfortable sensation churning in his chest at how small he sounds. He’s four feet tall and waifish as the day Bruce plucked him off the streets.

“You do not have to be defensive, Jason. Dick is not perfect. I know this. I love him for it, but he is as human as any of us.”

Says the demigod, Jason wants to say, right after, I’m not being defensive! but it sounds tonally inappropriate, so he refrains in favor of tonguing the roof of his mouth and shoving his free hand into his pocket to fool around with his keys.

He thinks this may be one of the first points in his life he has ever heard anyone call Dick _that._ The “h” word. It doesn’t settle as smoothly as he would expect it to.

“The kid—”

“Damian,” Donna prompts, gently but firmly.

“Damian,” Jason echoes, narrowing his eyes, “had a bad run in with a rapist on patrol today.”

There is silence, on the other end of the phone. The arresting of breath. An arabesque folds and freezes in midair. Were this anyone else, Jason would have assumed that they hung up.

“He was hurt.” It’s not a question.

Her thought process is tangible, to Jason, if only for how it mirrors his own. Breathe: in, out, in. Your lungs will expand. Your lungs will contract. Their tissue was made for it. Breathe. 

“Don’t know how far she got, but yeah.”

 _Seriously? Jason wants to demand. But then Damian swallows; Jason spots a_ —jesus— _curling around his Adam's apple._

“I would ask how he was doing, but I am going to be bold and presume that part of the reason that you are on the phone with me is that you yourself do not know the answer to that question.”

Jason swallows, rather than respond.

“How are _you_ doing?” Donna asks.

“Huh?” The exclamation is weak, open, but when he listens closely enough, it is all his.

“You told me you would die again before calling this number, last time we spoke. I think that if you are calling me, you must be in more dire straits than you would like to admit.”

“I think the words I used were a little stronger than that.”

Donna laughs. Jason doesn’t know how she manages it, under the circumstances, but it rings even through his phone speaker; it crunches like dried marjoram and has his heart sound just the same.

“I remember the word ‘fuck’ being thrown around once or twice.”

“Among other things,” Jason says, and he has to rush his next words out before they start clinging onto the back of his throat: “This isn’t about me.”

The closest thing he could analogue his lack of ability to continue speaking to was electrostatic force; maybe it was pushing words down his throat. Maybe it was ripping words from one windpipe to another. He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.

“You are as much involved in this situation as Dick or Damian,” Donna disagrees—agreeably.

“Brown’s here, too,” Jason puts it, because it sounds like something he should say.

“Then Stephanie as well.”

There is a pause. Donna’s breaths disappear, again.

“Has anyone ever walked you through ‘bullet wound vs. twisted ankle?’” she asks, eventually.

Bruce had, actually. He had sat him down one day after Jason had told him to fuck off when he wanted to intervene in him getting pushed around a little at school.

“There are people out in the world with real problems,” Jason had told him, and then scoffed. “Of course _you_ wouldn’t get that, but just… leave it alone, OK?”

“Pretend that you have a broken ankle,” Bruce had countered; it had taken five minutes for the conversation to continue after that; Jason had blown up at what had seemed to be one whole non-sequitur.

“Fine. I have a broken ankle. What about it?”

“Now pretend that, say… one of those children from the part of that human trafficking ring we busted last night has a bullet wound.”

“I bet they all _wish_ he had a bullet wound instead of what happened to him.”

“Jason,” Bruce had warned.

“Fine,” Jason had repeated. “Fine, Carl has a bullet wound.”

Bruce had nodded, his hands folded into each other. Upon reflection these days—an arrogant reflection, but one nonetheless—Jason thinks he might have been stopping himself from putting a hand on his shoulder. Thinking about _that_ too long makes Jason shift uncomfortably in any circumstance.

“If you two were at a hospital,” Bruce had said, “and that hospital was busy enough that only one doctor was available, who would you tell that doctor to treat first?”

“What kind of question is that?”

_“Jason.”_

“I’d tell them to treat Carl, obviously.” Jason had been inches from rounding on his at that point. “Where’s this going, B?”

“You’ll see,” Bruce had said. “Would you walk out of the hospital after they started treating Carl?”

“I mean, I could get someone else to set it. But if I was already there, I guess not.”

“So we’ve established that both wounds are important enough to need treatment then, haven’t we?”

Comprehension is a fickle thing, but that had been the moment that it had knocked Jason about the head. Pretty hard, at that. It’d probably have left him seeing stars, if it wasn’t an explicative hyperbole.

“That’s—that’s not. That’s _stupid.”_

“What purpose would denying yourself treatment serve you other than more pain?”

“It would leave the hospital with another free doctor if they didn’t have to treat me.”

“My analogy having a fallacy doesn’t change my point.”

They’d gone back and forth for a little while, and while Jason hadn’t agreed to let Bruce get in the middle between him and the goons who had been picking on him, he’d never really gotten what he had said out of his head.

Of course Donna would know something like that, but despite himself, Jason finds himself asking, “Where’d you hear _that_ one?”

“Diana.”

“Did the League hand out a goddamned mentor manual or something? Because Bruce told me the same thing back when I was a kid.”

Her smile is palpable through the phone. It shreds into him. It heals what it has shredded and then more.

“I think it is just good advice,” she tells him.

“Fuck,” Jason says, with feeling, and he finds himself blinking several times when Donna echoes him.

“‘Fuck,’ indeed.”

Silence begins pawing at his ears, again. He lets it, for a little while, but eventually bats it away.

“You wanna know the rest of this tragic night’s tale?”

“I do.”

“I blew up at Dick,” Jason tells her; it is immediate, without ceremony. “I blamed him for it.”

Throwing on his, “Report, Robin,” voice is the most he can do, in a situation like this. Self-deactualization has its own blessings.

“He deserved it,” Jason says, and that small, quiet, fresh-out-of-the-womb feeling is returning.

Donna hums.

“I don’t think you would be calling me if you thought he deserved it.”

Waiting for Lazarus to flood his veins is a habit, at this point. He knows what sets him off. He can infer his own triggers through the course of every conversation. Lazarus renders him nothing but a doll whose limbs can be manipulated at will, and Jason waits for him.

He never comes.

“I hate you,” Jason says. Jason spits. Jason murmurs. Jason snaps. Jason whispers. Jason couldn’t tell anyone for the life of him, how comes out of his mouth.

Rather than respond, Donna says, “Bring me to Dick.”

“OK,” Jason agrees. His mouth is running like a scorned Bugatti today.

He walks toward the stairs, and the door. He kicks out the brick. He locks it behind him. Jason ascends, and then Jason pushes through to the roof, and then Jason sees Dick, and everything Jason wanted to say, could have said, would have said, collapses on his tongue. Just like that.

“Dickie?” Jason prompts.

Dick’s spread himself across the roof, layed down and limbs splayed out in the way that falling rather than laying prompts. It’s raining, and he’s laying there, and even with the latex covering on the suit stymieing his saturation he has to be _freezing._ The mid-November shivers.

Dead. He looks dead.

“Dick?” Jason asks again, reeling up the pressure behind his voice. Not to burst, not yet. But fan the flames he does.

There’s Dick, and then there’s the rain, and then there’s the sky, gray-black and tabascoed with Gotham’s neons and spires of steel. He could be watching the whole thing through a misty mirror. It’s there. It’s not. They all float, down here. Maybe that’s the only constant there ever was.

“What’s going on?”

Jason had almost forgotten that he had Donna on the line.

“I think I killed him,” Jason says.

_“What?”_

There are about a thousand things Jason could parse through in the sharpened quality of her voice, but he doesn’t, because Dick has turned his head around. His eyes are—open.

That’s about the only semblance of a comfort Jason can take right now. Maybe he was wrong, earlier, because between the blown-out, glassy quality of them, and the way his limbs are flapped around, Dick looks as high as a _kite._

“Hey Jason,” Dick says. “You should come sit.”

His voice is a pitch too high, breathy. It sounds as if he’s just come down from a fit on Joker venom. _Hah, hah, hah!_

_Hey, hey bird brain? Which hurts more? Forehand—_

_—or_ backhand?

“Or you could get the hell up,” says Jason. “I’m not taking care of you if you catch a cold.”

“What’s going on?” Donna repeats, and this time, Jason can’t ignore her, because Dick’s head shoots up so fast that when he loses his balance and it slams back down against the concrete, there is an unequivocal _crack!_

“Donna?” Dick asks, despite the fact that he should not be able to hear her at all. His eyes go miles wider, if that’s even possible.

“He’s trying to catch pneumonia, is what’s happening,” Jason says. “Look—I’m going to put you on speaker, OK? This is way above my pay grade.”

“There is no pay grade when it comes to the people you care about,” Donna says, and Jason chooses to ignore that in favor of, in fact, putting her on speaker, and tossing the phone toward Dick.

He doesn’t catch it.

“Golden boy?” Jason asks.

There’s a snap of green there to curb his enthusiasm, but he stomps down on it as hard as living possible, and walks toward Dick in brisk steps instead.

 _“Dick,”_ Donna says, with firm, unyielding intent. “Dick, you don’t have to tell me what’s going on, but can you do something for me?”

“Anything for you,” Dick says.

Words like that could have the sun and the moon and the stars behind them. Words like that could clink between shots at a bar, could be whispered under bed sheets between kisses.

Words like that aren’t supposed to fall flat.

“I want you to tell me five things that you can see right now.”

“It’s raining, Donna,” Dick tells her. Jason can’t tell if he’s humoring her request or ignoring it in pointing this out.

“There’s one, Boy Wonder. Give me another. I know those sharp eyes of yours can spot _something.”_

“All I can see, Donna,” says Dick. Breathes Dick, and Jason gets the distinct impression that he isn’t supposed to be here. That no one is supposed to be here. “Is what he looked like as the life left his eyes.”

He laughs, then. Jason kind of wishes he had snatched Steph’s headphones before coming up here.

Was he talking about Damian? That—doesn’t sound right. Even this Dick would never collate rape victims, attempted or otherwise, as so unfixable that the “life had left their eyes.”

 _“All you have to do is get out of the way,”_ he says, and it sounds like it’s supposed to be a mockery, but joke’s on him because nobody in the room knows who he’s mocking.

“Who needs to get out of the way, Dick?” Donna asks, for both of them.

“She wasn’t bad,” Dick says, instead of answering. “She used to be an FBI agent. Do you even know the level of screening they have to go through for those kinds of things? The dedication she would have had to have had to complete the training for it?

_“She wasn’t bad.”_

“Unless you’re talking about the bitch who attacked baby Talia earlier tonight, no one’s saying she’s bad, Dickie-bird,” says Jason, to staunch the air expanding out of his lungs and compressing his chest à la reverse asphyxiation.

“Rolly,” says Dick; his eyes are turned back away from Jason, away from the phone, up toward the starless sky, “Rolly… I don’t want to say he was bad. He was hurt. But he _was_ cruel.”

“People often are,” Donna points out. There’s a new lilt to her voice. “Hurting spurs a lot of cruelty in the world. Not all of it, no, but enough.” She pauses. Jason thinks she’s done, she pauses for so long. “That’s not an excuse though. It never has been, and it never will be.”

“I don’t think—” Dick starts, but then cuts himself off. “Bruce—” he tries again, and Jason has half a mind to pistol-whip him before he finally finishes off with, “If you say so.”

He hasn’t moved once, other than to turn his head, the entire time Jason’s been on the roof.

“I do say so,” Donna informs him, and then she says, “Dick, are you sure there isn’t anything else you can see? You’re outside right now, right?”

Dick doesn’t respond.

“OK, that’s OK. You don’t have to say anything. You know what you can do for me, though? I want you to look. There must be buildings, right? Try and count out windows, or look inside to find people.”

A humming noise is the closest thing Donna gets to assent. She must decide that she’ll take it, because the next time that she speaks, she is addressing Jason.

“Take me off of speakerphone,” she says. It is in her distinctly “Troia” voice, the one she uses to restore order on the battlefield, or address a quailing crowd of civilians. She uses this voice now, a voice as old as eons and channeling the gods themselves. Their very own Oracle of Delphi.

By the power of Zeus I compel you to pick up that phone, she does not say, but pick up that phone Jason does. He taps, then taps again, then sticks it back to his ear.

“I’m gonna go over there for a few minutes, Hunk Wonder,” Jason says. It’s something he’s heard Barbara call him enough times that there is a slim part of him that lets his gaze drift to Dick’s face, looking for an anything or two.

“OK.”

Jason lets the sinking feeling in his gut rock him forward and into a strong stride. Walking to just inside the door of the roof, he leaves it angled so that the echo of his voice will go down and not up. He can still see the edges of Batman’s cape crowning the gravel. He doggedly stares at the ridges along its edges rather than Dick’s eyes.

“What’s this about?” he asks. “You better have made me leave a borderline catatonic Batman choking on rainwater for a good reason.”

Dick’s eyes aren’t the windows to his soul. They never have been. He’s too good at working the show for that, playing the game and walking the walk and talking the talk. Even without Bruce, he’d probably be good at that. The Atlas’ burden of emotional linchpins.

It’s still an exercise in masochism to look into them sometimes. Jason has done it, once or twice, and felt one wide, long swoop of a blow. Blade, blade, go away. Come again another day.

“I’m in Manhattan right now,” says Donna. “I know more about what’s going on than you do. I want you to corral him over here. Bring Damian, if you have to.”

Lips pursing, Jason lets his hand tighten on the phone, ever so slightly.

“Yeah, actually, about that: what _is_ going on? Because I’m getting really tired of being left out of the loop.” He begins pacing: two steps right, shift, pivot, two steps left, shift, pivot, on the stair he’s made himself at home on. “I get that you guys have your history. Teen Titans—”

“Jason.”

“—Fab Five—”

“Jason.”

“— unshakeable bond formed on the ruins of every hard-won battlefield, blah, blah, blah. But you can’t fucking do— _whatever_ we did, and then just eject me from some inner circle yo—”

_“Jason.”_

“What?” Jason snaps.

“I’m sorry, but as you said early, there is gravity to this situation,” Donna says. “Now isn’t the time, and notwithstanding, what’s going on with Dick right now isn’t my story to tell. Help our love right now, and we can talk about this later.”

Working his way through _any_ of that sounds like the precursor to a macabre night-show horror, and Jason isn’t particularly interested in playing eldritch. So he doesn’t. He ignores, “isn’t my story to tell,” ignores, “our love,” ignores the acerbic layers pressed between Donna’s words.

_“...isn’t my story to tell.”_

_“... isn’t my story to tell.”_

_“... help our love right now…”_

“Fine,” Jason says, and then slaps the phone shut on his palm before he can finish what Dick started and smash it into the wall. 

Green. He—can’t see. He _can’t_ —there is fire and brimstone and the insides of his body boiling, there is his blood going as quicksilver as liquid mercury, and his body remembers every pain, every scar that Lazarus took away. He’s being vivisected, the skin of his stomach is being sliced and then pulled apart with pins and all he can do is—

Jason grits his teeth and slams the door of the roof open.

“We’re going on a car trip, Dickie,” he says, and what he wants to say is, “by the way, you couldn’t have told me?” but Jason’s not _that,_ so what he says instead is, “up you go. I’m not sitting here and watching your fingers turn blue.”

Dick doesn’t respond.

“Look, you don’t owe me jack. And I don’t owe you jack, either. So let’s just get this over with, and we can talk about the kid in the morning. Blondie has that covered, or whatever.”

À la silence. It’s intoxicating, beguiling, at least in the sense that it’s wrapping around his chest and squeezing and imploring him to fill it. Jason has nothing better to do, so he’s inclined to listen.

“I still think you’re a dog for letting a kid prance around dressed like a traffic light to play target practice for scumbags, but I’m not going to let you do... whatever this is, either, so stop playing dead and start facing the music.”

Silence, again. Jason thinks he's tired of it. 

“He killed her,” Dick says eventually, with no strength to it. “I need to talk to Commissioner Gordon."

_Steph snorts, an uncharacteristically sardonic thing, and crosses her legs over each other. Rather than standing tall, she is hunched slightly inward. It's not a good look on her. "'Damage control,' is about the understatement of the year."_

“OK,” he says, and because Dick is not ready for any sort of “she got what was coming to her” conversation, he follows up with, “we can work with that. You know how many passes Gordon has given B over the years. You were there for half of them.”

When Jason doesn’t get a response, he levels out a sigh and strides over toward where Dick is splayed prostrate.

“Listen,” he says, “We’re going to figure this out later. Right now, we’re jacking a car and driving off into the sunset with your baby bat. I don’t want to speak for you, but if I were you I wouldn’t want to be touched right now, and I sure as hell don’t want to touch you, so you’re going to have to work with me here.”

“Jason,” Dick says, simply. He reaches a hand outward and splays his fingers, as if he is trying to grasp Jason’s face within and pull it toward himself. Like little kids do with the sun, sometimes.

It’s a little incongruent, considering Dick is the one Jason’s always seen the world warping around like a celestial body.

“Here,” says Jason, kneeling in front of him. He stares at his hands, breathing in, then out, then in again. Hesitates, breathes some more. Speaks. “Clearly you aren’t in possession of all of your faculties right now, so I guess we’re down to the bad touch. I’m going to grab your shoulder now.”

Dick makes neither a noise of assent or dissent, so Jason steels himself, and shoves a hand under his shoulder blade. Grasping around the ball of it, he braces his fingers along the back of Dick’s neck—even through the Batsuit, misty with raindew, he can feel heat radiating from it, which brings a whole new set of problems into the main cast but _whatever_ —and yanks him upward.

“Geez, you’re light,” Jason says, because once again the silence is fit to burst his eardrums all by itself. “I always knew you had that whole ‘acrobat’ thing going on, but you really are a daisy, aren’t you?”

He waits for a flinch that never comes, when he pulls Dick toward his own shoulder, but the joke ends up being on him because—

Dick leans forward and kisses him, and then Jason is the one who is flinching.

His lips are cold, that’s the first thing Jason registers. Cold, and wet, and _God,_ he still hasn’t gotten on shaving that stubble. He should feel something. He knows he should, but he thinks maybe someone took a spoon and scooped out the normal parts of him, the human parts of him, a long time ago. 

Jason is Bruce’s monster, the Joker’s monster, Lazarus’ monster, Talia’s monster. That must be why as Dick kisses him, all he can think is, “when is this going to be over.”

Finding it within himself to break the kiss is something. A task, and by the time he buckles up his bootstraps to get it done Dick is already shoving away to go collapse and vomit all over the ground.

 _“Jesus,”_ Jason says.

Dick stares at him. Jason keeps a carefully neutral stance to this, trying to ignore his stupid eyes, squinted and precise in the pressure they lay over his body. He’s staring at Dick too, he realizes. They’re caught in some liminal space carved out by this rainstorm, with water blearing their eyes. 

It would, by logic, by all empirical evidence, make sense for this space to wash everything away. But no, all the rain does is magnify. The look in Damian’s eye as he stood before them with his hair wild and ungelled, dwarfed by fabric and sin. The _tap, tap, tap_ of Steph’s finger. The way Dick smiles before he bursts into laughter, right there, right in front of a pool of his own vomit.

“I know you don’t wear lipstick,” he says. “I know you don’t. And I know for sure you don’t snort gunpowder, so I shouldn’t be able to taste _that_ either.”

Jason opens his mouth, and then closes it. He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and waits.

“It’s all I can taste. She didn’t even—” he pauses, chokes on a particularly vicious one, “—she didn’t even _kiss_ me that night. She did before. She did after. But not then.

“I hated him. I hated him, but what I let her do to him...”

Rather than speak, Jason folds to his knees, ignoring the burning sensation that burbles in the back of his throat each inch that he sinks. Stifling every bit of curiosity that presses him to _push._

“Girl Speedy knows what I’m about to tell you,” he says, “but no one else does, not even Bruce, so if you ever open your trap about it to a single person I’ll make sure that you can never open it again.”

One. Two. Three.

Say it.

—Nine. Ten. Eleven.

Say it.

—Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.

_Say it._

“It doesn’t go away,” Jason says, eventually. Instead. The instead that makes his gut roil a little less, in an ultimatum where all roads lead to unhappy endings. “But it gets better.” 

“I know,” Dick tells him. “This—is an old wound. For both of us, I guess.” He lets his voice trail off. With only his heartbeat to tango with, Jason lets the beats rock them both into a lull. “I’m sorry you know what it’s like.”

Jason doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he holds out his hand.

“Come on. We’re going to go visit the Girl Wonder to your Wonder Boy.”

Dick is looking at said hand, not his eyes, but Jason can still feel the weight of one thousand and one Gotham City nights in the strength of his gaze as he reaches out and grabs it. Their fingers mingle: damp, black glove on white, wet skin.

It has been a lightning free-night, but now, just once, it shreds the sky and rains down on them all.

“You’re really something else, Jason,” he says. It’s the most sure Jason’s heard him since he slipped from the apartment, slipped from his doe-eyed Robin and left to go make snow angels in the concrete.

Jason’s soaked, he realizes. Dick has a latex slipcover and whatever armor Alfred had bullied him into keeping on the Batsuit; Jason has a leather jacket and jeans that are probably making him look a lot like a drowned rat.

“Take off your cowl; at least get your hair soaked like the rest of us mortals.”

Dick doesn’t smile, exactly, but there’s _something_ there, when he says, “What would be the fun in that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cannot tell you when the second half of this will be out, but i can tell you that it is the only thing i am working on right now.


End file.
